Thread by @DrDannielle

1) It’s just another day in the Swamp.

Who is free to speak here?

It’s coffee time.
Tuesday, July 17, 2018.

2) Freedom of speech is fundamental to #democracy.

I read this the other day:

The remedy for offensive speech...is more speech.

3) Freedom of speech is so precious to our Nation. It is the antidote to tyranny.

Without it we are all reduced to slaves.

4) But people always seem to be attacking free speech.

5) The new thing is to throw @POTUS @realDonaldTrump supporters, or maybe just Republicans, out of cabs and restaurants and bars.

6) This of course is a light form of terrorism.

7) Another method of suppressing free speech is to try to get people fired from their place of work.

8) This is of course not an exhaustive list of the ways independent thinkers are threatened into silence, marginalized and shunned.

9) Some people respond to censorship with sarcasm, anger, and even hate.

10) Others adopt anonymous personas online.

11) And many, I am sure, simply go silent altogether.

12) But the very worst thing that can happen — the very worst thing of all — is when a person adopts the ideology of the censoring tyrant, out of fear, and then it starts to feel real to them.

13) If you ask me, I think this is the silent cancer that afflicts many people.

14) Thought cancer.

15) This millennial had a video online called “Job Interviewing Tips.”

Tip #1: “Say whatever you think they want to hear.”

16) How many times have my kids said to me, about an assignment: “I don’t know if this is what the teacher WANTS TO HEAR.”

17) As an adjunct professor myself, I have lost count of the number of times I had to tell a student: “STOP WRITING TO IMPRESS ME.”

18) And more than one student has said, in response: “But a previous Professor told us just the opposite.”

19) I took a class at CUNY Graduate Center with Stanley Aronowitz, a vocal advocate for the rights of workers and a brilliant human being.

He completely understood that most people belong in vocational school, not college.

20) Aronowitz graded my paper for that class, very briefly and at a high level. I recall he said it was “superficial” and gave me a B.

21) That one red mark did more for my education than all the “rubrics” in the world.

22) The first time I presented my dissertation, the panel just sent me home.

“Go read for a year Dannielle.”

23) I have to tell you, it doesn’t get much more leftist than the sociologists at CUNY.

But their personal ideologies did not matter in school.

These were incredible, incredible, incredible, incredible scholars.

24) Nobody at CUNY told me how to think. BUT THEY DID TELL ME WHEN I WAS NOT SUCCESSFUL AT THINKING.

25) It has become fashionable nowadays to moan and cry and scream about how stupid American students are.

But this is not the case.

Not at all!

26) The problem is that the school system itself is strangled and tangled in the web of political correctness.

27) Political correctness and intellectual inquiry cannot coexist.

28) It is appropriate to teach young people (and frankly, their parents) to stop bullying each other. To be more empathetic. To express your differences of opinion in careful, constructive ways.

29) If a child (or an adult) cannot behave respectfully, they need to be kept away from other people until such time as they can coexist in peace.

30) But to silence dissent in the name of sparing people’s feelings? That takes us down the awful road to thoughtcrime, and dulls our brains completely.

Another problem.

31) The world we live in is increasingly a dangerous place, socially.

Even the most insignificant negative interaction is dangerous nowadays.

32) The danger is so pervasive — all rules seem to be off. You never know when a situation will turn explosive.

And then you might find that people are simply filming it for fun.

33) Oddly for a generation so solicitous of others’ feelings, we seem to be almost completely antisocial.

34) But it’s worse than that.

Much, much worse.

35) Whenever someone says an especially true thing — a thing that threatens to challenge the corridors of power — others turn and say to them: “Aren’t you worried for your life?”

36) What we see, despite the bruising talk on social media channels, is that dangerous-to-the-status-quo people sometimes lose their lives.

Early.

37) Broadly speaking — because obviously people care, or they wouldn’t go into this line of work — the justice system does not seem to care about threats to independent thinkers. Whatever ideology they inhabit.

38) The message we are getting, right now at least, is that you speak honestly at your peril.

39) In order to be “sensible,” “protected” and “safe,” one must learn the art of seeming authentic, but never saying anything genuinely reflective of the self.

40) And in a crazy way, that very alienation from the mind is what produces such an astounding lack of empathy in the populace.

41) How do we fix this?

42) I would argue that we practice a radical form of undoing on this cancer of the mind, of society.

43) You be yourself. As long as you are not using that as an excuse to harm other people

44) You encourage others to say what they really mean. To think without YOUR filter occupying their brain.

45) You read, and consume information, and process it.

46) You write your thoughts, or document them visually.

47) You actively demand justice from the system. You learn that system, and participate.

48) You do the best you can to balance your personal outspokenness with the reality that not everyone will support your exercise of freedom.

49) You take the time to laugh. Not everything is life or death.

50) You pray to God for freedom. For an end to all this sick plastic censorship, and the beginning of real justice, the prosecution of evildoers.

Hope you enjoyed this installment of Coffee Time :-)

Have a great rest of the day.

(End.)

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